With bold originality, biographer Nicholas Boyle finds coherence in Goethe's bewilderingly protean life by placing it in the context of two revolutions: the one in France, and the Kantian revolution in philosophy, which Germans greeted as a corrective to politics abroad. These poles, the social and the philosophical, provide an axis for Boyle's dialectic, enabling him to place the poet in the age.

It was Goethe's turn this year, the 250th since his birth, to be caught in the lethal crossroads where politics and literature intersect. A scholarly dispute has developed concerning the correctness of his political behavior while a privy councilor in Weimar in the 1770's. In Germany the argument has tended to mirror the old East-West division, since Goethe was all but canonized in Communist-led East Germany, whose rulers were for decades the landlords of Weimar, the poet's adopted city.

Was Goethe gay? And if he was, does it change the reader's understanding of his greatness? The answer to both questions, according to Karl Hugo Pruys, is a resounding yes. Mr. Pruys is a freelance writer and journalist in Bonn and an acclaimed biographer of Chancellor Helmut Kohl who has just published a new study of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's literary titan, who was born in 1749 and died in 1832.

IT is not yet noon on a mild September day, but Yuri Lyubimov is already rolling. It is Day 1 of a new season at the famed Taganka Theater, and Mr. Lyubimov stands in the narrow aisle before the stage, cracking jokes and offering counsel as he greets...

Reactions to Peter Stein's monumental staging of both parts of Goethe's ''Faust,'' since its first performance at the Hanover 2000 Expo in July, have been split along national lines. In the main, the German critics have hated it (though not German...

January 4, 2001, Thursday

To the Editor: Peter Stein's unedited production of ''Faust,'' Parts 1 and 2, in Hanover, Germany, is a monumental accomplishment. But in Anne Midgette's article ''Germany's Classic of Classics, All 21 Hours'' [Aug. 6], she writes, ''Asserting...

It was Goethe's turn this year, the 250th since his birth, to be caught in the lethal crossroads where politics and literature intersect. A scholarly dispute has developed concerning the correctness of his political behavior while a privy councilor...

Always a crucible of the best and worst in Germany, this small town has emerged a decade after the fall of the Berlin wall as a focus of national questioning and conflict. Festivity should be in the air. This year is the 250th anniversary of the...

''My peace is gone,'' Gretchen sighs as she contemplates her woes in Goethe's ''Faust.'' So too, it seems, is that of the great poet who created her. In a secret operation in 1970, East German scientists exhumed the body of Goethe, loaded his...

''ARTISTS: All charlatans. What artists do cannot be called work.'' From Flaubert's ''Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.'' One of the most talked-about new paintings of recent years shows George Washington taking a stroll along the banks of a lake....